Penguin Island eBook

hung an open cage which was fastened by a chain to
a transverse beam. In the times of the Draconides
the Inquisitors of Alca used to put heretical clergy
into this cage. It had been empty for three hundred
years, but now Pirot was imprisoned in it under the
guard of sixty warders, who lived in the tower and
did not lose sight of him night or day, spying on
him for confessions that they might afterwards report
to the Minister of War. For Greatauk, careful
and prudent, desired confessions and still further
confessions. Greatauk, who was looked upon as
a fool, was in reality a man of great ability and full
of rare foresight.

In the mean time Pyrot, burnt by the sun, eaten by
mosquitoes, soaked in the rain, hail and snow, frozen
by the cold, tossed about terribly by the wind, beset
by the sinister croaking of the ravens that perched
upon his cage, kept writing down his innocence on
pieces torn off his shirt with a tooth-pick dipped
in blood. These rags were lost in the sea or
fell into the hands of the gaolers. But Pyrot’s
protests moved nobody because his confessions had
been published.

III. COUNT DE MAUBEC DE LA DENTDULYNX

The morals of the Jews were not always pure; in most
cases they were averse from none of the vices of Christian
civilization, but they retained from the Patriarchal
age a recognition of family, ties and an attachment
to the interests of the tribe. Pyrot’s brothers,
half-brothers, uncles, great-uncles, first, second,
and third cousins, nephews and great-nephews, relations
by blood and relations by marriage, and all who were
related to him to the number of about seven hundred,
were at first overwhelmed by the blow that had struck
their relative, and they shut themselves up in their
houses, covering themselves with ashes and blessing
the hand that had chastised them. For forty days
they kept a strict fast. Then they bathed themselves
and resolved to search, without rest, at the cost
of any toil and at the risk of eve danger, for the
demonstration of an innocence which they did not doubt.
And how could they have doubted? Pyrot’s
innocence had been revealed to them in the same way
that his guilt had been revealed to Christian Penguinia’s;
for these things, being hidden, assume a mystic character
and take on the authority of religious truths.
The seven hundred Pyrotists set to work with as much
zeal as prudence, and made the most thorough inquiries
in secret. They were everywhere; they were seen
nowhere. One would have said that, like the pilot
of Ulysses, they wandered freely over the earth.
They penetrated into the War Office and approached,
under different disguises, the judges, the registrars,
and the witnesses of the affair. Then Greatauk’s
cleverness was seen. The witnesses knew nothing;
the judges and registrars knew nothing. Emissaries
reached even Pyrot and anxiously questioned him in
his cage amid the prolonged moanings of the sea and